STOCKS TUMBLE AFTER JOBS REPORT SMASHES EXPECTATIONS: Here's what you need to know

Stocks fell on Friday after a jobs report that beat expectations
as the market capped one of its worst opening weeks in history.

The benchmark S&P 500 fell 6%, capping the worst-ever 5-day
start to a year. This also served as the index's worst week
since 2011.

The Dow, meanwhile, fell 1,082 points this week, the most for the
blue-chip index since 2011.

Friday trading was choppy all day before the final hour saw
stocks slide to their lowest levels of the session and
this ugly close will surely have investors on high alert
come Monday.

The scoreboard:

Dow: 16,346.5, -167.7, (-1%)

S&P 500: 1,922, -21.1, (-1.1%)

Nasdaq: 4,643.6, -45.8, (-1%)

WTI crude oil: $32.90, -1.1%

And now, the top stories on
Friday:

The US labor market is still on fire. In December,
the US economy added 292,000 jobs, way more than expected
as the unemployment rate
held steady at 5% and
wages rose 2.5% over the prior year. Wall Street
had been looking for an increase of 200,000 jobs. All in,
2015 was the second-best year for job gains since 2000 as 2.7
million jobs were added to the economy, trailing only 2014's
3.1 million. This wage growth, however, came against a weak
month for wages in December 2014 and so this 2.5% increase,
which matches the largest annual gain we've seen since the
financial crisis, was less than what economists had
forecast. Business
Insider/Andy Kiersz, data from BLS

Wage growth, which has been seen as the missing piece of the
labor market puzzle, could be pressed down by the labor
flows we're seeing. In a note following the job report Torsten
Sløk, chief international economist at Deutsche Bank, wrote that
the flow of workers from out of the labor force back into a job
could be suppressing wages as these folks have the least
bargaining power when negotiating on pay. However, Sløk noted
that this does go against the idea that those who lost jobs
during the recession have found their skills completely
non-transferable. Deutsche Bank

The total wage growth puzzle, however, is more nuanced (of
course!) than simply looking at the average hourly figure. A
figure from the jobs report which caught our eye was the
continued decline in the unemployment rate for workers with less
than a high school diploma. These workers, who on paper are among
the least-qualified in the workforce, are vulnerable when the
economy is soft and have made huge gains over the last 18 months
or so. And so thinking about the idea that there is no wage
growth — which isn't quite right, of course — the "force" keeping
wages down, in the broadest sense, is remaining slack in the
market. But data showing the least-qualified workers find
their way back into the workforce the balance of power clearly
tipping towards workers and away from employers. This is the
slack being "taken up," as it were. Part of that leverage
once-held by employers allowing them to keep wages down,
the, appears to be falling away. Business Insider/FRED

But it wasn't only good news in the jobs report:
mining jobs are still disappearing. Oil prices, as most
readers know, have collapsed over the last year and a half and
taken with them a good chunk of the industry's workforce. In
2015 mining and logging lost 129,000 jobs.

Speaking of oil, Goldman Sachs' chief equity strategist David
Kostin
joins analysts who are now seeing the impacts from the
drop in oil prices as more negative for the overall stock
market than previously thought. In a note Friday,
Kostin cut his earnings outlook for the S&P 500, citing a
nearly $2 negative impact from energy stocks with that sector
likely to see negative twelve-month earnings for the first time
since the firm's data begins in 1967. Overall, the firm now
thinks earnings will fall 7% in 2015.

Yahoo shares got a bit of a pop on Friday after a
Bloomberg report said the company could be considering a
sale — rather than a spin-off — of its core business. This
comes during what's been a newsy week for the company as
Business Insider's Biz Carson
earlier reported that the company was getting ready to cut
10% of its workforce as soon as this month.

Also in tech news, Twitter
shares fell below $20 for the first time as the slow
demolition of shareholder value continues at the social
networking company. As Brian Wieser at Pivotal Research told
Business Insider's Eugene Kim, "Sentiment is terrible. It is
surprising to see what is still one of the largest digital
properties on the planet trading at current levels."